Monday Reviews: XXY

I have more quick reviews to add from all the back-catalog renting and revival-house haunting I've been doing lately, as well as a whole mess of unfinished business from 2009 to catch up on. (And if the phrase "a whole mess" in relation to "2009" conjures up the immediate association of The Lovely Bones... yes, I finally saw it, and yes, it's as jaw-droppingly, peculiarly awful as everyone short of Kris Tapley has already attested.)

For now, to prove that I'm not dead, I'm just tossing up the one full review I've actually finished in the last week, for Lucía Puenzo's flawed but promising debut drama XXY (2007), about an intersexed pre-teen in Argentina whose parents may or may not be planning a genital-correction surgery. Alex, the central character, may or may not have intuited this looming possibility; Alvaro, the son of the couple who have just been invited so abruptly to the seaside home of Alex's parents, may or may not feel erotic attractions toward Alex, and he may or may not understand those desires, either before, during, or after he acts upon them.

XXY, reviewed here, was one of the movies I recently listed as enticing titles from the just-finished decade that I wished I had caught at the time. Of course I harbor big dreams of searching out all the movies I cataloged in that "Backwards & Forwards" series, and of course this blog is nothing if not a repository of big dreams. I am reminded, all the time, of my first visit to the home of a very famous professor for whom I was a research assistant in college. She had a room in the top floor of her house where she had installed some old choral risers she'd found in a flea market, so she could arrange her little heaps of paper corresponding to all of her unfinished, barely commenced, or never-quite-begun projects and look at them all with pride, whether or not she ever managed to do anything with them. She called this room her Study of Lost Causes.

I have not yet buckled to internal pressure toward renaming this blog exactly that, and hopefully, as the weeks go by, I'll feel even less reason to give into that temptation. Keep hope alive!